Chris Floyd, author of the book and the blog, Empire Burlesque, discusses the lack of – and need for – honest reporting in this country, how the state and media manipulate language to change or hide reality, the “success” of the surge only in prolonging the war, the phony facades of both presidential campaigns, the insanity of antagonizing Russia, Obama’s unfortunate choice of Joe Biden as VP, the complete silence surrounding our proxy war in Somalia and the spreading disaster that is “The War On Terror.”

MP3 here. (41:02)

Chris Floyd is an award-winning American journalist, and author of the book, Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Regime. For more than 11 years he wrote the featured political column, Global Eye, for The Moscow Times and the St. Petersburg Times in Russia. He also served as UK correspondent for Truthout.org, and was an editorial writer for three years for The Bergen Record. His work appears regularly CounterPunch, The Baltimore Chronicle and in translation in the Italian paper, Il Manifesto, and has also been published in such venues as The Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, Columbia Journalism Review, The Ecologist and many others. His articles are also featured regularly on such websites as Information Clearing House, Buzzflash, Bushwatch, LewRockwell.com, Antiwar.com, and many others. His work has been cited in The New York Times, USA Today, the Guardian, the Independent and other major newspapers.

Floyd co-founded the blog Empire Burlesque with webmaster Richard Kastelein, who created the site using open-source software. Floyd is also chief editor of Atlantic Free Press, which was founded and designed by Kastelein. Floyd has been a writer and editor for more than 25 years, working in the United States, Great Britain and Russia for various newspapers, magazines, the U.S. government and Oxford University.

Glenn Greenwald, author of Great American Hypocrites and blogger at Salon.com, discusses the brutal arrest of distinguished journalist Amy Goodman, among others, at the RNC convention, how the St. Paul police preemptively attacked journalists so they wouldn’t record the cops’ abuses, the storm-trooper like task force and tactics, the problem of the ease of use of non-lethal weapons to deny rights without generating sympathy for the oppressed and the blatant media bias on the side of the state.

MP3 here. (34:13)

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling books How Would a Patriot Act? and A Tragic Legacy. His latest is Great American Hypocrites.